"What would you have done?"
I shrugged. "The hell with it! If we had understood science and if we had believed in freedom we would have been willing, the minute the problem appeared, to fight for both—because they're one. We would not have permitted any bleak tyranny to interfere with the world-wide course of knowledge and the existence of our freedom."
"You're asking a good deal."
"I ask nothing. I merely point out that the fear of holocaust has been made permanent by our fearful failure to act. Freedom throttled will be difficult to revive. The habit of intellectual tyranny is already seeping into the pores of a world destined to be more panicky each year until either freedom of knowledge is restored or the far more likely chaos ensues. After chaos will come the regimentation, by opportunists, of a world that will have lost its grip on liberty. We bought a little time at the cost of all the values our ancestors piled up for us in the ages. It is a cheapskate civilization."
The Reverend Socker Melton suddenly chuckled. He had, in the midst of at least mild anxiety, hit on some straw, some philosophical prop. "Don't take it so hard! You sound as if you felt responsible for all the woes of man!"
"Don't you?"
"Good Lord! Certainly not!"
"You are a man, though."
"Just one man."